Evolutionary theory and psychiatry

While we welcome Abed's (2000) editorial and endorse the arguments presented in it, we feel that it gives an inadequate account of the important British contribution to the burgeoning new discipline of evolutionary psychiatry. Instead, it leaves one with the impression that Darwinian psychiatry is largely an American achievement and that Abed and Marks are the only home-grown contributors to it. This is unjust, as the application of evolutionary theory to psychiatric disorders began in this country 40 years ago at a time when American psychiatry was still in thrall to psychoanalysis and behaviourism. Bowlby's (1958) classic paper on the phylogeny of the child's bond to its mother and his life's work on the consequences of rupturing that bond for later psychopathology were seminal contributions to the development of the new evolutionary paradigm, as were Price's papers in the 1960s on social dominance and the evolution of mental illness (e.g. Price, 1967; further references in Stevens & Price, 2000a ). Since then, British psychologists and psychiatrists have contributed as much to this fascinating field of enquiry as our American colleagues, whom Abed cites. In particular, we would draw attention to the work of Crow (1995) on the Darwinian approach to the origins of psychosis, Gilbert (1992) on depression and the evolution of powerlessness, and our own work on the evolutionary basis of the major neurotic, ‘functional’ psychotic, and reproductive disorders (Stevens & Price, 20000a), and the phylogeny of schizophrenia, (Stevens & Price, 2000b ). In addition, significant work has been published by Archer (1992) on ethology and human development, Bailey (1987) on human palaeontology, and Birtchnell (1993) on how humans relate.

A major criticism advanced against ‘adaptionist’ explanations of psychiatric disorders is that they are untestable and therefore of little use; this is untrue. We have responded to this criticism by providing testable predictions based on evolutionary insights (Stevens & Price, 2000a . pp. 258-274). As Abed rightly suggests, scientific method requires “a theoretical framework that generates testable predictions”, that “demands what questions to ask” and that “ suggests what avenues of research are likely to bear fruit”. Evolutionary psychiatry is now sufficiently advanced in this country for this programme to be implemented. Unfortunately, an uninformed reader would not have gathered this from Abed's editorial.